Did the Babe ever hurt his oblique?
Blame supplements, weights for these injuries
When Aaron Judge became the unlucky 13th Yankee to land on the injury list after sustaining what Aaron Boone termed a “pretty significant” left oblique strain last Saturday, it didn’t matter whether you loved or hated the Yankees. If you were merely a baseball fan who enjoys watching the game’s biggest stars performing in person or on TV, you threw up your hands and shouted: “What the hell!!! How does this happen just swinging the damn bat?”
It’s the same question Rob Manfred and baseball’s medical poobahs probably need to be asking. What is going on with all these freaky muscle injuries in baseball? Broken bones, contusions, jammed fingers, shoulder and knee injuries, even concussions are all an unfortunate part of the game and the all-out way most players play it. But these muscle injuries — obliques, lats, quads, groins, calves, sports hernias et al — that too often crop up out of nowhere and drive managers crazy, should be a major concern to baseball. As of Monday, barely three weeks into the season, there were already 22 players
on the IL with all such injuries (excluding hamstring pulls) and you can be sure that number will continue to mount.
With the Yankees, it’s now officially a contagion. Here’s the horror story on oblique injuries (which normally take up to two months to heal) alone: According to MLB, there were 26 oblique injuries in 2014, 30 in 2016, 29 in 2017, and a staggering 47 last year, in which players spent 1,838 days on the disabled list!
There’s no question today’s baseball players, with their advanced training methods, especially weightlifting, are bigger, stronger and in better all-around shape than ever before. At the same time, the great players of recent yesteryear – the Willie Mayses, Carl Yastrzemskis, Al Kalines, George Bretts, Frank Robinsons, Kirby Pucketts, and Tony Gwynns, were all seemingly more durable, especially when it came to muscle injuries. By and large, baseball players until the ’90s didn’t do much weight training. Now they all do.
But while it may be easy to say bulking up with weight training results in the muscles becoming tauter and consequently more easily susceptible to pulls and strains, it’s not that simple. More than just lifting weights, it’s the supplements these players are taking with them. A few years ago, Creatine, an over-thecounter “performance powder”, was one of the more popular supplements used by players – until it was determined that it dehydrated the muscles, leading to pulls, strains and tears. According to football coaches I’ve talked to, there are any number of legal supplements players are all using designed to make leaner, harder muscles – but also dehydrate them.
Meanwhile, the Yankee high command is resigned to not seeing Judge back on the field for at least a month and probably much longer – while privately hoping the American League, littered with bad to terrible teams, will sustain them until the All-Star break when the troops supposedly should all be back. The problem is a lot of the players who are down – Judge (who, in 2016, had his season ended with a right oblique strain), Gary Sanchez, Giancarlo Stanton, Troy Tulowitzki – all have a history of muscle-related injuries, with low odds at this point of not getting hurt again.
In Judge’s case especially, since he’s their franchise player with whom they are presumably getting ready to do a long-term extension, they may want to first check with him to see what supplements he’s using. Might also be a good idea for him to spend his IL time these next two months anywhere other than the weight room.